An official script that
attributes political
violence in Colombia
to an all-powerful drug
mafia has shielded
the true identity of
the killers of Colombian
citizens from public
scrutiny and judicial
accountability.
uesday, August 19, 1994,
mid-morning. On an ordi-
nary, traffic-clogged street in
Bogotai, two motorcyclists ride up
alongside the motor car of a promi-
nent opposition politician, open fire
with heavy-caliber automatic
weapons, and ride away. In the
backseat, Senator Manuel Cepeda,
a respected, 60-year-old parliamen-
tarian and the sole surviving senate
representative of the ten-year-old
Patriotic Union (UP) party, lies
dying. In the landscape of Colom-
bia’s prolonged dirty war against
the organized left, the death of the
senator represented the latest mur-
der of an opposition leader whose
only crime, in the eyes of those who
ordered his “extermination,” was
that he favored a peaceful settle-
ment to the country’s 40-year-old
guerrilla war.
Within 24 hours of the killing, a
paramilitary group, the self-pro-
claimed “MACOGUE,” or “Death
to Communists and Guerrillas,”
claimed responsibility for this latest
assassination of a leftist political
leader. After studying the
MACOGUE communique, the new
government of President Ernesto
Samper duly attributed Senator Cepeda’s assassination to drug traf- fickers. For more than a decade, an offi-
cial script that attributes all the
political violence in Colombia to an
all-powerful drug mafia has shield-
ed the true identity of the killers of
Colombian citizens from public
scrutiny and judicial accountability.
Internationally, assisted by the
media’s single-minded obsession
with drugs, this official version has
gone virtually unchallenged since it
was first aired in connection with
the 1984 assassination of Colombian
Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara
Bonilla. Yet within Colombia, the
credibility of this official explana-
tion for all the killings that have
devastated the organized left since
the early 1980s has badly frayed.
In the last few years, scores of
investigations by Colombian and
international non-governmental
organizations, including the UN
Center for Human Rights, the
Council of the European Economic
Community and the Inter-American
Commission of the OAS, and by
the government’s own investiga-
tors, have built a solid case for dis-
carding this official script once and
for all time. The cumulative evi-
dence of the past 12 years reveals a
policy of systematic political and
6NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
Ana Carrigan won several awards for her
independent film Roses in December. Her
most recent book is The Palace of Justice:
A Colombian Tragedy (Four Walls Eight
Windows, 1993).
6 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASUPDATE / COLOMBIA
social “cleansing” of selected indi-
viduals and groups, sponsored and
organized by the state’s own securi-
ty forces. The story further involves
a degree of passive toleration of-
sometimes difficult to distinguish
from complicity with-this killing
by successive civilian govern-
ments.
The list of prominent politicians
and anonymous citizens murdered
in Colombia in the last decade is a
Friends and relatives mourn the victims afte tary massacre of 41 people in Segovia in 1988.
long one: four presidential candi-
dates: Jaime Leal and Bernardo
Jaramillo of the UP, Luis Carlos
Galan of the dissident wing of the
Liberal Party, and Carlos Pizzarro
of the M-19 Democratic Alliance;
two ministers of Justice: Rodrigo
Lara Bonilla and Carlos Mauro
Hoyos; thousands of elected civic
and political officials: mayors,
town councillors, community lead-
ers, indigenous leaders, and region-
al prosecutors; teachers, priests,
lawyers, journalists, human rights
activists; countless anonymous
peasants; the entire activist mem-
bership of one political party, the
UP; and workers: according to the
International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (ICFTU), Colombia
holds the world record for numbers
of assassinated trade unionists.
Like all of these murders, Senator
Cepeda’s geath had been “fore-
told.” For several months his name
had headed one of the sinister death
lists that circulate from time to time
in political, media and legal circles
in Bogotd. His assassination had
been “on hold”; his life was threat-
ened weekly, then
almost daily, on the
anonymous, cellular
telephone.
Manuel Cepeda had
no illusions. When he
knew he was the latest
target of the army offi-
cers who plan and exe-
cute the dirty war, he
went to see the then-
minister of defense,
Rafael Pardo, to ask him
to investigate his suspi-
cions of a military con-
spiracy to eliminate him.
Minister Pardo refused
his plea on the grounds
that Cepeda “had not
presented proofs.” After
the assassination, when
both Cepeda’s son and
r a paramili- the Secretary General of
November the Communist Party
asked Pardo’s successor,
Fernando Botero, to initiate an
investigation into the involvement
of the army in the senator’s murder,
he also declined. In the absence of
prior proof, the minister explained,
he had no justification for opening
an investigation.
As columnist Antonio Caballero
acidly commented in the
newsweekly Cambio 16: “After
careful reflection, the Minister of
Defense explains that in order to
investigate for evidence it is first
necessary to have the evidence. If
not, there is nothing to be done.
Neither suspicions, nor clues, not
even the formal, prior accusation
by the dead man himself, whose
subsequent assassination might be
said to provide a certain element of
credibility to this case. No: what is
needed are the proofs. And if they
don’t exist, it’s not possible to look
for them.”
And finally, there was nothing
arbitrary about the timing of Cepe-
da’s death. Contrary to the much-
promoted view that all of the vio-
lence in Colombia operates in a cli-
mate of uncontrollable chaos, polit-
ical violence is never arbitrary. It is
selective, efficient and systematic.
When the victim is a national fig-
ure, his murder always carries a
message and is in response to a spe-
cific context, as befits a calculated
policy geared to advance a precise
political agenda.
In the case of Senator Cepeda,
the context was the inauguration of
the new government that had
assumed power two days earlier
amid a flurry of promises to make
the protection of human rights a “priority issue” of its agenda, and
public pledges to re-open negotia-
tions with the guerrillas and seek
an end to the war. The message
delivered by this latest assassina-
tion put the new President on
notice: any attempt to bring the
guerrillas in from the cold would
not be tolerated.
It is a simple message. Its content
has not varied since its first airing in
the early 1980s, for it precisely
reflects the political agenda that has
perpetuated all the political violence
of the last 12 years. In the terminol-
ogy of the hardliners in the army
and among the right wings of both
traditional parties, who direct and
pay for the murderous activities of a
proliferation of paramilitary groups
with names like “MACOGUE,”
support for a negotiated solution to
the 40-year-old peasant-based guer-
rilla war means “support for the
guerrillas.” Consequently, the mes-
sage spelled out in some 30,000
identifiable political killings since
the early 1980s reads: “No negotia-
tions. No peace.”
Vol XXVIII, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1995 7
4
4
0,
Vol XXVIII, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1995 7UPDATE / COLOMBIA
In the past, wherever Latin
American “dirty wars” have
flourished on a scale compara-
ble to the Colombian experience of
the last decade, they have always
been sponsored and conducted
from the Presidential Palace, where
the strong man of the hour tradi-
tionally took up residence follow-
ing a military coup. As a conse-
quence, wearing the uniform of an
identifiable tyrant and law-breaker,
the military dictator was vulnerable
to international opprobrium, and
even perhaps to economic sanc-
tions. At the very least, his democ-
ratic opposition could count on the
informed solidarity of an alerted
international community.
Alas for Colombians, their case
is unique. The Colombian military
doesn’t need to stage coups.
Colombia’s ostensibly democratic
civilian government provides the
military-on whom it depends for
its survival-with limitless free-
dom to exercise arbitrary power.
Armed with an impressive display
of image-boosting official human
rights mechanisms (even the Min-
istry of Defense boasts its own
“Human Rights Office”) and the
strongest, most talented diplomatic
force in the hemisphere, the
Colombian government polishes its
democratic credentials for foreign
consumption. Meanwhile at home,
behind a brilliant facade of democ-
ratic institutions, it steadfastly pur-
sues a 40-year-old policy of uncrit-
ical support for, and complicity
with the military’s brutal domina-
tion of all aspects of Colombian
life.
In 1991, for example, the credi-
bility of this democracy, marred
somewhat by the government’s
recourse to “States of Seige” in 36
of the previous 43 years, received a
uniquely pseudo-democratic face-
lift. The repeated suspension of
constitutional rights, which had
cast a troubling shadow over the
country’s democratic credentials,
was made unnecessary with the
invention of a new constitutional
category: “States of Internal Com-
motion.” Henceforth, no Colom-
bian president would need to risk
alerting international scrutiny by
publicly resorting to a “State of
Seige.” Under a “State of Internal
Commotion,” his power to preside
over the same limitations on inter-
nationally recognized rights and
democratic principles is now con-
stitutional.
Colombia has had, year in, year
out, the highest per-capita level of
homicide in the Western world.
Though distinct and apart from
ordinary criminal violence, the
political violence benefits from this
general climate of brutal criminali-
ty which provides essential “cover”
for its activities. The exploitation
by the government of
drug-related and crimi-
nal delinquency is a
necessary, essential Alai
component
of the dirty case ii
war. It underwrites the
impunity that protects mil
the involvement of its
own agents in political sta
crimes, and perpetuates
and sustains the policy
and the strategy of the
murderous “cleansing”
of opposition forces.
Within the context of the general-
ized collapse of the rule of law, and
the penetration of virtually every
aspect of Colombian life and soci-
ety by drugs and wealthy traffick-
ers-beginning with the provision
of financing for the political cam-
paigns of the two traditional par-
ties-various actors in the drama of
Colombian violence sometimes
overlap. It is possible, even proba-
ble, that on occasion, some of the
most sensitive political executions
may be carried out by the drug car-
tels acting on behalf of the
“MACOGUEs” and their military
handlers (and vice versa).
The evolution of the dirty war
against the Colombian left is trace-
able through certain key periods of
recent political history. Dirty-war
tactics, specifically against the
urban guerrillas of the M-19, had
been an increasing part of the
army’s arsenal since the mid- and
late 1970s. In 1982, a group of
hardline, U.S.-trained counter-
intelligence officers initiated a
high-risk criminal alliance with the
drug mafia in Medellfn that has
since grown into a Hydra-headed
monster. Twelve months earlier, in
response to the kidnapping of a
family member of one of the
founders of the Medellin cartel by
an M-19 commando, the drug traf-
fickers had struck back by creating
their own death squad-the Medel-
lifn-based “MAS,” or “Death to
Kidnappers”-to “cleanse” Medel-
lin of urban guerrillas. By the time
for Colombians, their
unique. The Colombian
litary doesn’t need to
ge coups to maintain
its limitless power.
the Colombian army was done trad-
ing intelligence, training, organiza-
tion and strategy with the cartel
leaders, in return for men, weapons
and the money to pay for them, the
“MAS” had evolved into the basic
unit on which all subsequent col-
laboration between the army and
the drug mafia would be modelled.
Much is known about the army’s
role in the organization of the
“MAS” thanks to the results of a
1983 judicial investigation of their
murderous activities undertaken by
the attorney general of the day, Car-
los Jim&nez G6mez, who brought
then-President Belisario Betancur
evidence of army and police collu-
sion with the drug-financed thugs
of “MAS.” That year, Jim6nez put
his own life on the line to go public
with the names of 59 army and
police officers implicated in hun-
dreds of death-squad murders, mas-
sacres and disappearances in Medel-
lin. In a reaction that set the pattern
for official passivity whenever
accusations or evidence of involve-
An army tank leads the assault on the Pala
of Justice in 1985.
ment by the armed forces with
drug- or privately financed death
squads and paramilitary groups sur-
face, Betancur refused to take
action. The President soothed the
generals by increasing the defense
budget, and the army high com-
mand promoted the highest ranking
officer involved and dispatched him
to a high-level training course in
Washington, D.C.
Then, in 1986, following the
UP’s phenomenal success in
national and local voting, new
alliances between the army and
large landowners-many of them
also drug traffickers-sprang up in
all of the conflict zones where
today regional paramilitary groups
and even private armies operate
openly as partners in the army’s
C
a
counter-insurgency activities. As
ever, the predictable “cleansing” of
the land of non-combatant peas-
ants, suspected of guerrilla sympa-
thies, has created a situation that
some observers refer to as a “hid-
den counter land reform.” It is no
coincidence that while counter-
insurgency has generated almost
three times as many casualties
among non-combatants as
among the guerrillas, and has
created a refugee population of
600,000 internally displaced
peasant families, drug traffickers
have acquired 21% of the coun-
try’s arable land.
Odious though all compar-
isons of the statistics of death,
torture and disappearances are,
in the case of Colombia, one of
the few ways available to grasp
the depth of the crisis is to situ-
ate it within a hemispheric and
historical context. In Colombia,
the toll of political victims of
state terrorism demonstrates that
every year since 1986, more citi-
zens have been killed, disap-
peared, or suffered death from
torture at the hands of the State
or its paramilitary allies than the ice total of all the victims of political
repression in Chile during the
entire 17 years of the Pinochet mil-
itary dictatorship.
According to statistics compiled
and analyzed by the Andean Com-
mission of Jurists, 25,491 non-
combatant Colombian civilians
died in political and social violence
between June, 1986 and June,
1994. Of these deaths, 29% were
shown to be the responsibility of
the rural guerrillas and leftist urban
militias. The guerrillas have also
been identified in 50% of violent
kidnappings of wealthy landowners
and businessmen.
Tellingly, almost 70% of these
identifiable assassinations, mas-
sacres and enforced disappearances
have been committed by the
Colombian army and police, or by
paramilitary groups and privately
financed death squads operating in
partnership with state forces.
Since 1991, official investigators
for the government’s newly
appointed human rights office, the
Defender of the People, have, at
great personal risk, investigated or
tried to investigate hundreds of
cases where army officers have
participated-acting alone or in
collusion with the paramilitaries-
in massacres of unarmed civilians,
and in individual murders and dis-
appearances. They report, however,
that their work has been rendered
useless by the government’s un-
willingness to support its own offi-
cials.
Of 1,200 cases relating to army
involvement in murder and disap-
pearance of civilians which were
investigated in 1992 and 1993, the
office of the Defender of the People
reported that just one percent
resulted in disciplinary action.
“Notwithstanding the government’s
promises,” wrote the Defender of
the People, Jaime Cordoba, “these
abuses are tolerated and covered up
by the superiors of those who have
committed them.” Faced with an
archive of information document-
ing the corruption and criminality
of its military, no Colombian
administration has yet demonstrat-
ed the political will necessary to
confront the criminals in its midst
and impose the rule of law.
hroughout the last eight
years, as the crisis of politi-
cal violence has progressive-
ly deepened, every new legal and
administrative measure has been
geared to increasing the army’s
ability to protect the killers in their
ranks, while simultaneously open-
ing new and legal avenues of mili-
tary repression. The most serious
concern is the so-called judicial
“reforms” of 1991, which resulted
in the creation of a parallel “secret
justice” system that eliminates the
right of due process and is in gross
violation of all universally recog-
Vol XXVIII, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1995 9UPDATE / COLOMBIA
nized legal procedural norms. In
1993, President Gaviria decreed
modifications to the Code of Crim-
inal Procedure which turned over
critical police functions-includ-
ing detention, and the gathering of
evidence-to the military. For the
first time in Colombian history, the
army was thus granted a permanent
role in the prosecution of civilian
cases. Ostensibly designed to com-
bat drug trafficking and guerrilla
terrorism, in practice, these mea-
sures are used to arbitrarily treat
legitimate social protest and ordi-
nary criminal offenses as crimes of
terrorism.
Financed to the tune of $36 mil-
lion by U.S. aid, the Colombian
criminal justice system has been
converted into an instrument of
repression against the civilian
opposition against which there is no
appeal. In circumstances in which
the use of torture by the military in
the process of “gathering of evi-
dence” is routine, the evisceration
of judicial review over military–
and presidential-actions has
removed all independent controls
over arbitrary acts. By the end of
President Gaviria’s term of office
last year, over 5,000 political pris-
oners were held in Colombia’s jails.
As recently as 1985, Colombia
had an independent judiciary of
high integrity, with a history of
lonely and courageous resistance to
the militarization of Colombian
society. That was before the hierar-
chy of that judiciary was physically
eliminated by the army’s guns and
shells during the military counter-
attack on the Palace of Justice, in
response to the invasion of the
building by a commando of M-19
guerrillas. Over a hundred civilians,
including most of the justices of the
Supreme Court, were killed or dis-
appeared in the 1985 assault.
However, in 1991, the new Con-
stitution included simpler ways of
ensuring that meddlesome judges
would no longer interfere with the
army’s conduct or reputation. It
created an all-powerful justice-
czar-a prosecutor general
appointed by the executive-with a
staff of 10,000 investigators, sole
responsibility for high-level judi-
cial appointments, and exclusive
power over the selection of crimi-
nal cases for trial. Next, in direct
contravention of the Nuremberg
Principle, it enshrined the military
doctrine of “Due Obedience to
Superior Orders” in the new consti-
tutional statutes, and expanded the
military code of jus-
tice to encompass all
crimes committed by
the military against
civilians.
Thus, with the full
cooperation of the
Vice-President of the
Constitutional Con-
gress, recently
amnestied and effi-
ciently guarded ex-M-
19 guerrilla leader
Antonio Navarro
Wolff, then-President
Gaviria found the
legal mechanisms to
destroy the indepen-
dence and impartiality
of the Colombian Yet another
criminal justice sys-
tem while simultaneousl
ing the army with the legal
tee of systematic impunit
itary crimes committed
civilians.
Meanwhile, several k
sions, taken in the first r
Ernesto Samper’s newl
government, directly con
his administration’s stated
ment to the defense of hun
and a negotiated end to
war. The refusal to inves
murder of Senator Cep
choice of new military lea
the decision to establi
“security associations” o
armed civilians-with the
tion of the landowners wh
the paramilitaries-have
clear signal of continue’
reluctance to confront the blanket
impunity that drives and perpetu-
ates state terrorism.
Most revealing is Samper’s
choice of Major General Harold
Bedoya Pizzarro for the number-
two post in the military hierarchy.
Through Bedoya’s entire career, he
has been implicated with the spon-
sorship and organization of a net-
work of paramilitary organizations.
Bedoya, who has never undergone
any investigation for his involve-
killing is reported in a Bogotd newspaper
y provid- ment in the massacres of non-com-
al guaran- batants or other dirty-war crimes, is
y for mil- an articulate proponent of the con-
against tinued “legal” involvement of local
populations in counter-insurgency
.ey deci- operations.
months of Colombia’s pseudo-democrats
y elected are more intelligent and efficient
flict with than most. To those in Colombia
commit- who, every four years, yearn to
nan rights believe that as each new adminis-
the civil tration enters the revolving doors of
tigate the power, it will live up to its word and
,eda, the attack the legal impunity that pro-
aders, and tects and perpetuates the killing
ish rural of so many of their best and bright-
if legally est, these decisions were bad news.
coopera- After all the rhetoric and all the
[o finance promises, life and above all death
e sent a in Colombia appeared to have
d official returned to normal.
